I'm up before the light this morning (the first of September here in New Zealand) to check on messages from TM. He stopped for a short break around 11 AM after seven and a half hours of driving. He'd only made it as far as Brookhaven in Mississippi, which usually is a two-hour drive from New Orleans, about 135 miles.
At this rate, god knows when he'll arrive in St Louis - typically it's nine hours from Brookhaven, but it's sure to take much longer. I don't know how long he can drive by himself without total exhaustion setting in. I hope there's somewhere in southern Missouri he can stay. One Christmas, after we came off the road in Arkansas because of the snow and ice, we ended up in a Super-8 Motel just off the highway at Sikeston, I think. We got the last available room and had to park in a snowdrift. Good times!
Tom bumped into someone he works with at the rest stop in Brookhaven - James McLaren, who's the dean of Newcomb-Tulane College, en route to Oxford, MS with one of his daughters.
I've also heard from Paige up in Marksville; their house, Slowness, is packed with evacuees from Plaquemines Parish, a fruit-growing area across the river from New Orleans, well below sea level. The evacuees are all Levasseurs and Becnels, the family of Jennifer, Rodney's daughter-in-law, and their friends. Paige says she's cooking for twenty people so far, and expects more to arrive today. They're all planning to ride out at the storm at Scott and Lisa's place, because it's made of brick. Slowness made it through Hurricane Rita but we only got the outer bands of the storm that day. Gustav looks like much more trouble. The governor has placed all 64 parishes under a state of emergency. (We have parishes in Louisiana, not counties.)
The weather guru Mark Schleifstein predicts that electricity will be out for at least a week in New Orleans, and much longer elsewhere, if the storm maintains its present track. We'll get hurricane force winds and 10 to 15 inches of rain, at least, with the possibility of tornadoes. He says the city of Houma should expect a storm surge of 12 to 16 feet of water. The river levees will hold, he thinks, though the surge will overtop them at the lower end of the river. The entire West Bank will flood because of storm surge.
Buses taking evacuees without transport out of the city are running until 3 PM today (Sunday). People are allowed to bring their pets with them. This public-transport evacuation has already carried 15,000 people out. About half of city residents has already left, according to The New York Times. The East Bank of Jefferson Parish just got the mandatory evacuation call, for the first time in history. The curfew in New Orleans begins at dusk tonight.
The hurricane is Category 3, but getting more organized. The whole LA/MS coast is under hurricane warning. The storm surge flooding will start in about twelve hours, ahead of the first heavy bands of rain. According to the WDSU model, heavy rain will continue through Wednesday. (You can watch Margeret Orr's forecast.) Tulane's talk or re-opening on Thursday seems pretty optimistic at this point.
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